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Showing my ignorance of a number of advanced metrics here. I don't completely (perhaps, at all) understand Matt Garza's 1.0 WAR thus far this season. He's tied with Roy Halladay for highest WAR and trails only Halladay with 7.9 RAR (to Halladay's 8.2). Is this based heavily on his 12+ K/9? Or .474 BABIP? I know a lot of the standard pitching stats mean virtually nothing when it comes to assessing value but just don't understand how a guy with a 0-2 record, a 6.27 ERA, a 1.71 WHIP who's averaging 6 innings per start, giving up 1-1/2 hits per inning and batters hitting .338 off of could even be considered in the top half of starters, not to mention the best or second best in all of baseball in terms of the earlier mentioned categories? Are there other more relevant numbers I should be consulting?

The reason I ask is because a trade was proposed to me and it seems to me to be somewhat of a no-brainer but when I went to look at the numbers deeper, Garza's value jumped out at me. The guy is offering Max Scherzer (who I like somewhat) and Jordan Walden (who I'd really like to have) for Garza. Any thoughts on the deal?

Unless your league uses WAR or RAR, just toss that out the window when considering what is best for your fantasy team.

Compare what they are projected to do in your categories, then do a gut check to determine if you trust those projections.

Garza is a pretty interesting case. You don't often see a guy who is blowing people away in FIP categories(25 K, 5 BB, 0 HR in 18 IP) getting hit as hard as he is(.338 BAA, 34% LD%). It would seem like he's been throwing too many strikes, but he's been in the zone less than any point in his career. My guess is that his BABIP stuff has further to go down than his FIP peripherals, so going forward you'd want to value him a bit higher than at the beginning of the season. Whether that's worth Scherzer(who has a similar profile but has had some good fortune thus far) and Walden is up to you.

We don't really know anything about a player today that we didn't know three weeks ago, given the small sample size of what has happened so far this year. So would you have made this trade 3 weeks ago?

Garza is inflated b/c he's whiffed a bunch of guys. But Matt Garza is not a strikeout pitcher. Career 7.22 K/9. So far, he's at 12+ this year, or at a Randy Johnson level. That will regress. Another thing he's not is a ground ball pitcher, and with the Cubs outfield defense, the park he calls home, and the nature of hitters to start warming up and balls to start flying in warmer weather, probably today is about as good as Garza will ever look. Now is a great time to sell high on Garza, because he's not what his numbers have been through three starts.

Scherzer is a beast. His career FIP is 3.79, to only 4.18 for Garza. His career K rate is 9.02 per 9 IP. His K rate today is darn near identical to what it was last season, as is his walk rate. His HR rate is inflated b/c he gave up 4 of them in his first outing, and that is making his FIP and WAR look ugly. He will even out over the season and be far superior to Garza. Now is a great time to buy low on Scherzer because his numbers so far are skewed by one terrible game with 4HR.

I'd make this deal in a heartbeat. (Yeah, I know I vented about Scherzer in the other thread.)

Garza's also whiffing a bunch of guys because he's facing a ton of them because of all the hits. FIP, and thus WAR, is very nearly as meaningless with these tiny sample sizes as ERA. Garza's value now is what it was before the season started, unless someone has picked up something definitive in his delivery or his stuff.

I wonder if Lynn has a cat named Garza.